Posts by Rule of Thumb

PsychOps?

... and if so, whose eyes does NRO not want on its bird?

Anything's possible. Does anyone know the rate of "just plain doesn't work" problems in newly lofted satellites? You hear it happening but it seems rare and therefore unlikely.

Where are the Cortina cycles coming from?

I haven't used Cortina but Siri and "Ok Google" are unreliable for me. Often, when I actually NEED voice help (e.g., while driving) my Android phone cannot send the voice data to Google. It seems to be related to entering the nearest big city.

So, where will the Cortina processing happen, locally or on Redmond servers? I'm sure Cortina will be cool for some use cases, but I'm pretty confident that we're seeing the evolution of the next clippy. Even for the use cases where it's a neat solution, I'll bet it's unreliable.

Anyone care to explain Ballmer's math?

>if you're worth $150bn, eventually somebody thinks you're gonna make $15bn pre-tax and they make about zero

Can anyone expand on what Ballmer is saying here? By "make pre-tax" I guess he means profit, because their quarterly revenue was < $20BIL. Why should market cap. equal ten times some profit?

Brilliant, but...

I wonder what it feels like to go 800+ MPH without a vehicle? At that altitude, I'll bet it's depressingly pedestrian unless you go into a spin...

However, the stated purpose seems odd. Do we need vehicle-less exploration of the stratosphere? It's not like high altitude biologists need to observe the mysterious denizens of the heights, right? How much data can a human observer gather that couldn't be gathered by instrument?

So, my guess is that part was for his spouse: "No really dear... It was for SCIENCE, not some silly joyride."

Re-invent productivity?

True story: Today I reviewed my student's draft proposal (in Word). Some of her equations seemed distorted. It turns out that it's too hard to make equations in Word (maybe I should say too tedious), so she's been creating them in LO and copying them as pictures from LO and pasting them into Word. I suggested she just use LO. I don't know that I can stomach any more "re-inventing" from MS.

It also stung that Gavin called Sinofsky a data guy and blamed the unholy horror that is Windows 8 on the use of data over "the human factor" (whateverthefuck that is). But then I remembered what I tell my stats students on day one: thinking that statistics and data are about numbers is like thinking that the Declaration of Independence is about spelling and grammar; statistics is about insight. And then I felt better about Windows 8 being data-driven: they just didn't collect the right data or they mis-interpreted it (or, even more likely, they extrapolated beyond the circumstances that gave rise to their data). I'm also reasonably certain that the "telemetry" in the article did not involve any A/B testing.

Did you notice...

Ha ha. FB sucks...

But did any of you fucktards notice that the effect sizes are all the first decimal of a percentage? The largest Cohen's d was 0.008. Essentially nothing happened.

I know the unwashed masses are stupid but I expected some of you to notice the obvious.

Wait a minute...

Step 1. Correll makes sweetheart deal with X in order to later get cushy VP position. Step 2. Correll retires. Step 3. Correll applies to SPACEX!?!?!? Step 4. Correll gets cushy VP job with supplier to X.

Step 3 doesn't add up. Correll would never have applied to SpaceX if he knew he had a job waiting at X, unless he applied to SpaceX simply as a diversion?

I hope Musk prevails. I'm quite confident that the USAF wastes money. But Musk's revelation about Correll's SpaceX application seems inconsistent with the accusation. Of course, if proven I hope Correll gets prison but the last such scandal that I can recall the per got 9 months... Doesn't seem like sufficient punishment.

The warfighters...

I believe the actual quote was like this:

"The warfighters are presently laser-focused on the risk associated with the cyber world," Ridge said. "I dare say that no one could steal hundreds of classified military docu... Manning? ... Really? ... Well, the NSA files are secur... Snowden? Russia!? ... As I was saying, the warfighters are for shit and I guess private enterprise is actually doing OK."

Kidding aside, this is the most vacuous El Reg article I've read in a while. Slow news day?

Word for Windows ... exploded in popularity??

I call bullshit on this. The article makes it seem like Word was a huge hit in 1989. I saw this bit in the MS blog about this release and I choked on it there too. Having been there, my observation is that Word was a small player until somewhere around WordPerfect 5.2 and I think most people were still using DOS (and the DOS version of WP or WordStar or something similar) until Windows 95 came.

Wikipedia seems to agree with the article ("Word for Windows was released in 1989. With the release of Windows 3.0 the following year, sales began to pick up and Microsoft soon became the market leader for word processors for IBM PC-compatible computers"), but it doesn't match my recollections from the times at all. Am I misremembering? Or does "soon" mean several years later?

PermissionDog?

I think I already have an app that does this... Except I deleted it because I noticed that I mostly start up a handful of apps and I (thought I) could detect a delay in launching them after installing PermissionDog.

I suppose that if this app is well executed, it could do a lot of good but I think what I need is a better explanation of what the permissions are... Angry Birds needs to know what "read phone state and identity"? What exactly does that mean?

It would also help if I could control these permissions, like denying such permissions. An app that lets me do THAT would be useful.

This doesn't seem unreasonable

I suppose fewer eyes will read an article entitled "You'll hardly notice ads that run inside Firefox" but this is almost a non-event for my favorite browser. If this helps at all in keeping FF updates coming, I welcome my new advertisement overlords.

I would far prefer that the new tab brought up my home page, but so long as I can pin my homepage to the new tab grid, I certainly don't care what the other cells show.

Sounds a bit desperate?

Applying economic forces to this problem might have some success, but does this sound a bit desperate to anyone else? If this program principally communicates that it's almost impossible to catch people who do this, then it could backfire.

I also have to wonder who does this (11 x day)? If these are terrorists, then I have to say that I'm thrilled at their ineffectiveness, but I wonder how many arrests will result. It's not like terrorists go to the pub after a hard day's jihad and complain to the bartender.

At a guess I'd say that most of these people are morons and even if they got a bunch of moron convictions, I don't know how many morons that will dissuade because... they're morons. I'll bet their money would be better spent exchanging laser pointers for $10 McDonald's coupons.